Career Paths After Qualifying: Private Practice or In-House?

Somewhere between your third FLK2 mock and the moment you finally get your name on the roll, a slightly uncomfortable question surfaces: what am I actually qualifying into? Most candidates park it. The exams are loud and immediate, and the career question feels like something Future You will sort out. Then admission arrives, the recruitment cycle moves, and Future You turns out to be a person with three weeks to decide between a corporate seat, an in-house counsel role at a logistics company, and a Government Legal Department application that closes on Friday.

Worth thinking about earlier. Not because you need a twenty-year plan — nobody sensible has one — but because the choices you make about qualifying work experience, the practice areas you actually enjoy while grinding through FLK1 and FLK2, and the sort of people you want to spend Tuesday afternoons with will quietly narrow or widen your options long before anyone offers you a contract.

The three worlds — and why the labels are lazier than they look

"Private practice, in-house, public sector" is the standard triad, and it's useful shorthand. It's also a bit misleading, because the variation within each category is often bigger than the gap between them. A newly qualified solicitor doing high-volume residential conveyancing in a four-partner firm in Shropshire and an NQ in a magic-circle leveraged finance team are both "private practice". They share a regulator and almost nothing else.

So treat the three headings as starting points, then interrogate the specifics. The questions that actually predict whether you'll be happy are more granular:

• Who is my client, and how many of them do I have? One internal business, or forty external ones?
• Am I paid for my time, or for outcomes?
• Do I own a matter end-to-end, or a slice of it?
• How close am I to the decision — advising the decision-maker, or drafting for someone who advises them?
• What does a bad week look like, and how often does one happen?

Nobody asks these at a law fair. They're the ones that matter at year three.

Private practice: the default that isn't compulsory

Private practice remains where the majority of newly qualified solicitors in England and Wales start, and there are good structural reasons for that. Firms are set up to train. They have supervision frameworks, precedent banks, know-how teams, and — crucially — a business model that tolerates a solicitor who is slow for the first eighteen months because someone senior is billing at four times the rate.

Large commercial and City firms

You'll get technical depth, genuinely complicated documents, and the sort of client names that make later career moves easier. You'll also get specialisation faster than you might expect. An NQ in a securitisation team is not doing "banking law" in any general sense by year two; they're doing a narrow slice of it extremely well. That's a feature if you like mastery and a bug if you like variety.

The trade is hours and control over your diary. The honest version: the money is real, the training is real, and so is the 11pm markup on a Thursday. Some people find the intensity energising for four or five years and then leave for an in-house role with the technical credibility to command it. That's not a failure of the model — for a lot of people it is the model.

Regional, high-street and boutique firms

Here you get responsibility earlier and a wider caseload. If you qualified with strong Property Practice and Wills and Administration of Estates knowledge — the FLK2 subjects that plenty of candidates treat as a chore — you may find you enjoy the work far more than the revision suggested. Running your own probate matter, dealing with a bereaved family, spotting an intestacy problem in a half-remembered family tree: that is a different professional life from reviewing schedule 4 of a facility agreement, and for many solicitors a more satisfying one.

Boutiques sit slightly apart. A ten-lawyer employment or immigration practice can offer City-quality work with a fraction of the bureaucracy. The catch is thinner supervision and less margin for error, so they tend to want a couple of years' post-qualification experience before they'll take you.

What private practice tests that the SQE doesn't

Business development. Nobody assesses your ability to bring in work, and yet from about year four onwards it becomes a large part of how you're valued. If the thought of hosting a client breakfast makes you want to lie down, that's information — not disqualifying, but worth factoring in.

In-house: closer to the decision, further from the precedent bank

The in-house legal profession in the UK has grown substantially over the past two decades, and it is no longer treated as somewhere solicitors go to slow down. Big banks, insurers, retailers, energy companies, universities, football clubs, NHS trusts and a very long tail of scale-ups all employ solicitors directly.

What changes is your relationship with the client. You have one. You sit in their meetings, you know their commercial strategy, you can see the consequences of your advice in the quarterly numbers. Advice becomes shorter, faster and more commercial — the classic in-house complaint about external counsel is a fourteen-page memo that never answers the question.

In private practice you are asked whether something is lawful. In-house you are asked whether the company should do it. Those are different questions, and the second one is harder.

The downsides are real too. Smaller teams mean less technical mentoring; you may be the only person in the building who knows anything about consumer credit. Budgets are tight, so you'll be triaging what to send out and managing external firms rather than doing all the work yourself. And the career ladder is shorter — a legal team of six has one General Counsel, and she may be forty-one.

A worked example: the NQ who went in-house directly

Consider a candidate — call her Priya — who completed her two years of QWE across three placements: eight months in a mid-sized commercial firm's commercial contracts team, ten months as a paralegal in the legal function of a SaaS business, and six months in a legal advice clinic doing consumer and housing matters. She passed FLK1 first time, resat FLK2 after a narrow miss on Solicitors Accounts and Trusts, then cleared SQE2.

On paper, her application to a City firm was competing with candidates who'd done a full two-year training contract there. Her application to the SaaS company's expanding legal team was competing with almost nobody, because she had already drafted their data processing addenda, knew their reseller agreement inside out, and had a General Counsel willing to vouch for her. She went in-house at NQ, on a salary below a City NQ and above a regional one, with a mandate covering commercial contracts and a slice of privacy work.

Two observations. First, her QWE wasn't a random accumulation of experience — the SRA framework deliberately allows up to four organisations, and she used that flexibility to build a coherent story rather than a scrapbook. Second, going in-house at NQ narrowed her immediate technical range while sharply increasing her commercial exposure. Three years later she was doing work that a private-practice contemporary wouldn't touch until senior associate level, and she'd be the first to admit her drafting of anything outside commercial and privacy had gone rusty.

Both outcomes are defensible. Neither is the "correct" one, whatever anyone on a careers panel tells you.

Public sector and not-for-profit: the underrated third door

This is the category candidates know least about, which is odd, because it contains some of the most legally interesting work available in England and Wales.

Government legal work

The Government Legal Department and the legal teams of individual departments and agencies advise on legislation, judicial review, public procurement, national security, human rights — the constitutional and administrative law you revised for FLK1, except with real consequences and real claimants. If you found yourself genuinely enjoying the Wednesbury unreasonableness questions rather than grinding through them, that is a signal worth taking seriously.

Prosecution and criminal work

The Crown Prosecution Service, local authority prosecution teams, and regulators such as the FCA or the Health and Safety Executive all need solicitors who can handle criminal and quasi-criminal work. Advocacy features heavily, and unlike much of private practice you may be on your feet within months. If SQE2 advocacy was the assessment you actually looked forward to, note that down.

Local authority and NHS legal teams

Enormously varied: child protection proceedings one week, a planning appeal the next, a contracts dispute with a facilities provider after that. Local government solicitors tend to describe the work as relentless and meaningful in roughly equal measure. Pay sits below commercial private practice; pensions, flexibility and job security often compare favourably.

Legal aid and charity sector

Housing, immigration, community care, welfare benefits, discrimination. Chronically under-resourced and utterly dependent on people who choose it deliberately. Be clear-eyed about the finances — the sector's funding pressures are well documented — and equally clear-eyed about the fact that a housing solicitor stopping an unlawful eviction on a Friday afternoon has done something a corporate NQ will wait years to match.

A rough comparison — and how to use it

One asymmetry deserves emphasis, because it drives a lot of sensible early-career decisions: the door from private practice to in-house is wider than the door back. Firms recruiting a five-year-qualified associate want billable technical output; five years of commercial in-house work doesn't map onto that neatly. It's not impossible, and it happens more than it used to, but plan on the assumption that it's harder.

How your SQE route and QWE quietly set the odds

Under the current framework for solicitor qualification in England and Wales, you need a degree or equivalent qualification, both SQE assessments, two years of qualifying work experience, and to satisfy the SRA's character and suitability requirements. (If you started down the Legal Practice Course route before the SQE came in, transitional arrangements may still apply to you — check the position on sra.org.uk rather than relying on what someone told you in 2022.)

The QWE piece is where candidates leave value on the table. Because it can be gathered across up to four organisations and confirmed by a solicitor or COLP, it's tempting to treat it as a box to fill. Employers read it as a narrative. A candidate whose QWE spans a claimant personal injury firm, a defendant insurer's in-house team and a law centre has an obvious and articulable interest in dispute resolution. A candidate with three unrelated placements has to explain herself in every interview. Both satisfy the SRA requirements; only one is doing career-building at the same time.

Three practical points:

1. Record your QWE contemporaneously. Competency-by-competency notes, kept as you go. Chasing a supervisor two years later for confirmation of work you can barely remember is a special kind of misery.
2. Let your revision inform your preferences. Thirteen subjects across FLK1 and FLK2 is a broad diagnostic. If Business Law and Practice made sense to you in a way Land Law never did, that's a data point about how your brain works, not just about what you memorised.
3. Don't over-index on pass rates. Candidates spend a lot of energy on SQE pass rates and comparatively little on what happens after. First-attempt performance varies considerably between sittings and cohorts; the SRA publishes the figures after each assessment, so read those rather than the rumours. No recruiter has ever asked me what my FLK1 score was.

Where exam preparation and career strategy actually overlap

They overlap in one place: efficiency. Every hour you claw back from inefficient SQE revision is an hour you can spend on applications, coffees with people doing the job you're curious about, or actually doing your QWE well. That's the real argument for structured practice over passive reading — targeted question work with proper analytics tells you which of the thirteen subjects still needs attention, instead of leaving you to reread all of them. I've watched candidates spend a fortnight re-highlighting Trusts notes when 200 well-chosen questions would have surfaced the same three gaps in an afternoon. If you want a system that prioritises unseen questions and your previous wrong answers, the Ant Law SQE Question Bank is built around exactly that logic, with subject-level mastery data so you can see where you actually stand rather than where you feel you stand.

Deciding without a crystal ball

You are not choosing a life. You are choosing a first job, which will teach you far more about your preferences than any amount of reflection. A few heuristics that hold up reasonably well:

• Optimise for supervision in the first three years. The single best predictor of whether you become a good solicitor is who checks your work and how carefully. Ask about it directly at interview.
• Prefer breadth early if you're uncertain. Narrowing is easy; broadening later is not.
• Test before you commit. One honest conversation with a local authority child protection solicitor will tell you more than a week of research.
• Take the money seriously, not solemnly. Debt levels and family circumstances legitimately shape decisions. Just don't pretend a salary alone will make an unbearable job bearable.
• Watch the five-years-qualified people, not the partners. They are the realistic version of your future.

The profession is more permeable than it looks from the outside. Solicitors move from the CPS into regulatory in-house roles, from City corporate teams into charity general counsel positions, from high-street private client work into judicial appointments. What travels with you is technical credibility and a reputation for being the person who answers the question. Both are built in the first few years, wherever you spend them.

So: finish the exams properly, then choose deliberately. If you're still in the FLK1/FLK2 phase and want to spend fewer evenings guessing whether you're ready, run a timed 90-question set on the topics you've been avoiding and see what the analytics say — the Ant Law SQE Question Bank at antlaw.ai is free to try on web, iOS and Android, and honest feedback on your weakest three subjects is worth more right now than another read-through of your notes. Confirm the current sitting windows, fees and assessment details at sqe.sra.org.uk before you plan anything around dates.